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For the black in the paintings I do not buy anything. Lamp soot collected on a piece of tin over the diya, then that soot mixed with a little gum from the neem tree, and it is ground on a flat black stone with a small round stone in the hand. That stone was my mother's. She used it for maybe forty years, and before that I think her mother's sister used it, I am not fully certain. It is getting thin in the middle now. When I press, I can feel the dip where her hand went round and round. Some days I think I should keep it aside and buy a new one from the market in Darbhanga for the daily work, and save this one. But then what will I grind on? A stone sitting in a cloth on the shelf is not a stone any more, it is only a memory. My mother would have laughed at me for keeping it unused. She ground her kajal on it till the last year of her life and never once said this is precious, keep it safe. My son says I should photograph it and put the photo online so people understand the work. I do not know. A photo of a stone does not tell you anything about how the arm gets tired. The thing I am actually worried about is the dip. One day the stone will break through in the middle and then forty years of somebody's hand will just be two pieces on the floor. Any of you who work with old family tools, kindly tell me. Do you retire them or do you keep using till the end?

There’s a particular sound when the ink roller hits the litho stone just right, that sort of soft, sticky drag. It’s not like anything else, not the scrape of a blade on lino or the hiss of a spray can. It’s a sound that means you’re getting somewhere, that the image is starting to lift off the stone and onto the paper. Spent all morning with that sound, trying to get a really deep black on this new piece. It’s not a hare this time, something a bit different, but the same old graft really. You get lost in it, you know? The world outside just fades away and it’s only you and the stone and the smell of the ink. Grand way to spend a Tuesday, I’ll tell you that for nothing.

Picking out a block of limestone this morning. Twenty years I've been buying from the same yard. Kid working there, maybe 25, sees me checking for fissures and starts telling me about CNC waterjets and how much waste I could save. I told him I don't want to save waste. I want the stone to tell me where to cut. He looked at me like I was speaking Latin. Not mad about the tech. It's fine for some things. But I'm not trying to produce units. I'm trying to find what's already in there. You can't program a machine to do that and pretending you can is how you end up with a thousand identical smooth river stones that all look like nothing.

Back when I was still doing fabrication for other artists, I used to buy a lot of limestone from this old guy out in Indiana. Third generation quarry family. Tough customer. You showed up late, he'd make you wait. You talked too much, he'd just walk away mid-sentence. One day I'm complaining about a commission that fell through. Client loved the maquette, then ghosted. I'd put three weeks into it. He's loading stone onto my truck and he doesn't even look up. Says "Did you ask for money before you started?" No. Of course not. I was young and wanted the work. He says "Then you didn't have a client. You had a hope." That stuck with me. For years I operated like making the thing was the hard part and selling it would just happen if the work was good enough. That's not how it works. The stone dealer knew that. The gallerists I've dealt with know it too, they just don't say it out loud because the silence benefits them. I'm not saying be a salesman. I'm saying the transaction is part of the arrangement, not an afterthought. If you can't talk about money with someone before you make them anything, you don't have a deal yet.

Lady wanted a granite garden stone for her husband's memorial. Personal piece, carved text, took me eleven days off and on. I charged $2,600. Did the math on the drive home. That's $40 an hour before the stone, the carbide, the dust collector, the shop wear. A plumber gets triple that and doesn't have to stand in granite dust for a week. The thing is, she was happy. She said so twice. And I still felt like I should apologize for the number. Thirty years in and I can't get past that part. I know the drill. Raise your rates. It's a skill, not a hobby. I heard all of it. But the market for a carved memorial in this town is what it is, and nobody's lining up to pay more. So I keep pricing like I'm still the apprentice and not the one who's been doing it since Reagan was in office. Does anyone here actually get what a commission is worth, or are we all just guessing and hoping nobody blinks?

Spent the morning on a piece of Indiana limestone I've been working for two weeks. Block was clean, good color, no veins. I kept pushing on it. Refining a curve that didn't need refining. At noon I stepped back and saw what I'd done to it. Took that curve too far. Now I'm chasing it back. Thirty years in and I still do this. The stone tells you when you're done and I keep going anyway because stopping feels like I'm being lazy. Had a mentor who'd slap his hands on his thighs and walk away mid-afternoon. I thought he was slacking. He wasn't. He just knew. Now I spend half my time carving and the other half wishing I'd walked away an hour earlier. If you're at the point where you're just fiddling, put the tool down. The work is already done. Fiddling is how you ruin it.

Spent two hours grinding out a weld on the back side of a joint today. Nobody will ever see it. It gets covered with stone. My old boss would have said leave it, the grinder is for what shows. I ground it anyway. Not for the piece. I just can't leave a bad weld in something I made even when it's buried. I know that's not rational. Been at this thirty-some years and I still don't know if that's craft or just a tic. Maybe they're the same thing.

Took a commission for a carved limestone piece last winter. Eight weeks of work on and off. Quoted $4,800 and the client said "that's it?" which I should have read as a warning about myself, not a compliment. I broke it down after delivery. Stone cost $620. Studio overhead, sanding discs, carbide, the rented truck to haul the block, my time at what I actually worked, it came out to about $11 an hour. I've been doing this thirty years. I still price like I'm afraid someone's going to find out I'm not worth it. The client was happy to pay more. I was the one who couldn't ask. Raised my rate last month for the first time in four years. $65 an hour. Feels like robbery. That's the whole problem.

Six months on one piece of granite. I don't usually work that slow. Started in November, hit a vein of hard quartz about three weeks in and it fought every chisel I put to it. Nearly scrapped it twice. Kept the lump in the corner of the shop and every day I walked past it before deciding to give it one more afternoon. Pulled the last tool off it this morning. No polish, left it the way it came off the stone. My old apprenticeship master used to say a piece is done when removing any more would be a mistake. This one is that. It's not going anywhere fancy. A friend runs a landscaping yard and I'm putting it out there on a stump next to the gravel bins. See if anyone touches it. That's the real test, who stops to run a hand over it. My daughter said I'm being stubborn about the gallery stuff again. Maybe. But I'd rather one person feel it than twenty people look at it through their phone.

Working a block of Indiana limestone this week, a small piece, maybe forty pounds. Cut past my line on the left shoulder of the form by about a quarter inch. Not a disaster. Just means the whole thing is now a quarter inch narrower than I wanted, and every measurement downstream of that has to move with it. That's the thing nobody tells people starting out. You can't put it back. With steel you cut and weld and grind and it comes back. With stone the mistake only goes one direction, and the only skill that saves you is knowing when to stop hogging off material and go to the chisel. I still catch myself rushing that last half inch. Thirty years and I still do it.

Found a block of granite in the yard that's been sitting there since my apprenticeship. Forty years, give or take. I hauled it around because it was the first stone my old teacher let me pick myself. Good piece of rock, no cracks, but it never told me what it wanted to be. Last month I got the nerve to cut into it. Turns out it wanted to be a very plain low bowl. Not art, exactly. Something for a doorstop or a paperweight or a man's table. I'm keeping it on my own bench. Some pieces leave, this one stays home. Took me forty years to figure out that's the whole point of it.

Had a young guy at the booth this weekend, looked at my price tag, nodded like he'd figured something out. Said he could probably do the same thing himself with a Dremel and some YouTube tutorials. I said maybe he could. But I'd been thinking about it all evening and it still bothers me. Not the disrespect, I don't care about that. What bothers me is the assumption that the tool is what matters. Like the only difference between me and him is I own bigger equipment. I've got a 50lb tungsten chisel that I dressed myself because nothing on the market was right for the cut I needed. I spent three months learning to sharpen it right. A Dremel wont teach you how to read grain or when to walk away or what to do when you're 40 hours in and the stone decides to split wrong. Anyway. He walked off with a print. Probably gonna try to carve it this weekend. I hope he does. That's how you learn the difference between wanting to make something and wanting to have made something.

Cut a piece of limestone wrong this morning. Not a big deal, a flat relief panel, I can take it down and rework the surface. But the stone keeps it anyway. You can grind it flat, sand it level, and the crack is still in there, waiting to open back up on the next pass. Been thinking about that all day. There's no undoing a cut. You can only go deeper past it. That's the part of this work that never changes, no matter how good your tools get. Everybody wants to talk about the moment of creation. Nobody talks about the hours spent living with the mark you didn't mean to make. This panel is 24 inches wide, four hours in, back to a flat surface now. The steel is waiting on the bench for the next piece. Different problem entirely, at least until I cut that wrong too.

Nine years ago I made a floor panel for a couple in Kalamaria, about 1.2 square metres, smalti and marble, a vine pattern they wanted because of her grandfather's garden. Last month they sold the flat and the new owner didn't want it, so they brought it back. Not angry at anyone, they just didn't know what else to do with it and I was the only person they knew who handled this. So it's leaning against my studio wall now. And the strange thing is, I have the leftover smalti still in a jar, same batch, and I've started cutting into the two sections I always hated. There's a leaf on the right edge that's too heavy and I knew it at the time and sent it anyway because I was behind and they were paying by the week. I'm not repairing it. Nobody asked me to. I just want to see if I can make that leaf sit down properly. Nine years of setting stone and my hand knows things now it didn't then. Funny what comes back to you when you're not expecting it.

Every piece of limestone I carve ends up the same way. I pick the block, map out the form, rough it in right, and then about halfway through I start chasing the vein. There's always this one line of darker stone running through it and I keep trying to work with it, shape around it, make it mean something. It never works. The piece ends up looking like I fought the material instead of the material and me agreeing on something. I did it again this week on a 200 pound piece of Indiana limestone and I knew better the whole time. I told my old mentor about it once. He just looked at me and said the vein isn't the problem, you are. I've been chewing on that for fifteen years and I still don't know if he meant I should stop trying to feature it or stop pretending I can ignore it. Maybe it's the same thing. Anyone else got a habit that keeps repeating even though you know exactly what you're doing when you do it?

Dropped a slab of bluestone off at a quarry supply yard this week to get it re-surfaced. Been using this same stone thirty years. Same yard, same guys, most of them know me by name. New kid behind the counter. Twenty-two maybe. Sees the work order, sees it's going to a sculptor, and launches into a lecture. Sandstone is softer, better for fine detail, you should really be using limestone if you want it to hold an edge. Talking at me like I just walked in off the street. I let him finish. Then I asked him when he last dressed a block with a point chisel, or even held a bushing hammer. He said he hadn't. I said the bluestone's fine, I've carved about four hundred tonnes of it, and my edge holds plenty. He's still mad about it. I paid and left. Young enough that being wrong in front of people still costs him something. I get that. But I've earned the right to not be schooled by a kid who's never swung a fretsaw. The worst part is I'll get older and do the same thing to someone else. That's what's coming for all of us.

I see younger sculptors reaching for angle grinders before they've learned to read the grain. Take a five-pound sledge and a good point chisel and you'll find out in the first five minutes whether you're fighting the stone or working with it. A grinder just makes dust faster. It doesn't teach you anything. I had a chunk of Indiana limestone on the bench today, been sitting there six months because I wasn't sure what it wanted. Took the sledge to it this morning. Knew in ten swings. Sometimes you just have to commit and see what happens.

Not going to pretend I have any idea what I'm doing on here. My daughter set this account up and I'm trying. But here's what actually worked for me this year. There's a stone yard about 40 minutes from the studio. Big operation, commercial stuff, countertops and monuments. They've got a pile out back of broken slabs, cutoffs, chunks with veins running the wrong way. Stuff they'd pay to haul off. I went in person three times over two months. Brought coffee once. Just asked if I could pick through it. They finally said fine, just sign the waiver. I've pulled maybe 800 pounds of good marble and granite out of there so far. Paid nothing. And the crazy part is, a local contractor saw me loading pieces into my truck one day and asked what I was doing. That turned into a commission. Then the yard guys tell their customers about me sometimes when someone wants something custom. Cost me about 12 bucks in gas and some patience. Way better return than the Instagram ads my daughter set up for me. Those got me nothing but spam accounts telling me my work is "mesmerizing." Anyway. If you work with physical materials, find the local supplier's scrap pile. Bring coffee. Ask nice. That's the whole strategy.

Not sculpture exactly, but close enough. Neighbor's property line needed a wall after a bad washout. I told him I'd do it for the cost of materials if he left me alone to work. Took all summer between other jobs. Dry-stack is a different kind of patience. No mortar to hide behind. Every stone has to lock in on its own weight. You spend half the time flipping rocks trying to find the face that wants to sit where you need it. Then you tap it in with a hammer and it either rings solid or you pull it back out. Laid the capstone this afternoon. It's four feet high, thirty feet long, and it'll be there after I'm gone. That's the part that still gets me after all these years.

Spent the morning on maintenance instead of making anything. The 9 inch angle grinder started screaming at me last week, that high whine that means brushes. Took the whole thing apart, cleaned out about a cup of limestone dust that had turned to paste in there, blew out the windings, new set of brushes. Runs right again. Took two hours. People who don't do this think the work is the chisel hitting the stone. Most of it is this. Sharpening, oiling, chasing down vibration, fixing what the dust eats. My dust collector filter is shot too, that's the afternoon gone. I don't mind it. Half the reason I still do this by hand is I know every part of the machine that way. When something's off I hear it before I see it. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't looking at the block the whole time.